This invention relates generally to digital content processing and particularly to object tracking in sports video content from videos captured by mobile computing devices.
Motion detection and tracking of a moving object, such as a golf swing, are widely used to enhance athletes' performance. Taking golf as an example, golf is a sport that often requires good control of motions of a golf club, and an accurate analysis of the golf swing motions detected by a motion sensor can enhance golf players' performances. One way to enhance a player's sports performance is to analyze the motion data by tracking the player's fast moving golf club.
Some conventional systems that capture the motion of the player use additional equipment that can capture the velocity and or acceleration of objects such as a golf club or a baseball bat. Alternatively, the analysis of the motion is performed based on a video of the player performing the motion. The sports video may be captured using a handheld device. However, conventional solutions of object tracking for handheld devices also face the challenge of practically and accurately tracking the objects of interest, which often move extremely fast and deform drastically in sports videos. Handheld devices oftentimes have a limited computing power and memory and thus, the analysis of the video may take an unacceptable long amount of time. Additionally, due to the size of the video, a user of the handheld device may not want to transmit the video to a different computing device with larger computing resources.